During their three-day meeting
last month, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe again asked US President Barack
Obama to speed up exports of American natural gas to help his beleaguered and
energy-poor economy. But the big energy revolution that could ride to Tokyo's
rescue may not come on tankers from US ports, but rather from deep underneath
the sandy seabed off Japan's own shores.

Methane hydrates, which are
chunky packets of ice that trap huge amounts of natural gas in the form of
methane, are looming ever larger in Japan's plans to meet its needs for energy
in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and skyrocketing bills for
imported fuel.

Other Asian countries facing an
energy crunch, including South Korea, India and China, are also hoping to tap
into the apparently abundant reserves of methane hydrates, also known as "fire
ice."
That could help fuel growing economies - but it could also fuel further
tensions in regional seas that are already the stage for geopolitical sabre
rattling and brinkmanship over natural resources.

Totally unknown until the
1960s, methane hydrates could theoretically store more gas than all the world's
conventional gas fields today. The amount that scientists estimate should be
obtainable comes to about 43,000 trillion cubic feet, or nearly double the
22,800 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable traditional natural gas
resources around the world. The United States consumed 26 trillion cubic feet
of gas last year.

That raises the possibility of
an energy revolution that could dwarf even the shale gale that has transformed
America's fortunes in a few short years. It could also potentially have big
implications for countries, including the US, Australia, Qatar and even Russia,
which are banking on unbridled growth in the global trade of liquefied natural
gas. The trick will be to figure out exactly how to profitably tap vast
deposits of the stuff buried inside the sea floor.

Enormous
potential

"There's no doubt that the
resource potential is enormous," says Michael Stoppard, managing director,
global gas, at energy consultancy IHS. "I think it's the ultimate rebuttal
to the peak oil and peak gas concept, but of course that's not much good unless
you can develop it."

To that end, this month a
499-tonne survey vessel nosed out of the port of Sakai, once home to fabled
gunsmiths and the finest makers of samurai swords in medieval Japan and today
the prospective launching pad for a new technological revolution.

For the next two months, the
Kaiyo Maru No 7 will survey the sea floor off Japan's west coast, the first
step in a years-long process that could end with significant production of
natural gas in Japanese waters. A promising methane hydrate site off the
southeast coast was the subject of earlier surveys.

Japan is the epicentre of methane
hydrates today not because it has so much of the resource - quite the opposite,
most methane hydrates appear to be in North America - but because it needs the
resource so badly and is working faster than any other country to make fire ice
a commercial proposition.

The US and Canada are awash in
methane hydrate resources, found both under the seabed such as in the Gulf of
Mexico and in sub-Arctic permafrost. But both countries also have huge reserves
of conventional and shale gas, dampening industry enthusiasm for a complicated,
lengthy research process.

Although some companies, such
as Chevron, work alongside the US government on methane hydrate research,
"there's a little less space in the industry for enabling field
experiments and data collection than there was 10 years ago," says Ray
Boswell, technology manager for methane hydrates at the US Energy Department's
National Energy Technology Laboratory.

Not so in Japan. This spring,
researchers in Japan reached a technical breakthrough, figuring out exactly how
the gassy bundles of ice release 160 times their volume in methane as they are
taken out of low-temperature, high-pressure environments. That could make
commercial extraction, which experts estimate is at least 10 to 15 years off,
an easier proposition. Continue
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